So the mayors from southwestern Ontario — including Stratford's Dan Mathieson, who met with Via Rail officials to see if there was any way to stop the deletion of yet another passenger train from the Sarnia to Toronto corridor — should just save their breath.

Stratford will soon have just two trains to Toronto and two trains back. Municipalities along the line have been similarly impacted and now passenger train travel to and from Toronto is pretty much non-existent.

Case in point, Via officials were able to take the train to London for Thursday's meeting but had to drive back (that makes a lot of sense) because there was no train to Toronto anywhere near the time frame needed.

Mayors and anybody else fighting this fight to get even minimal passenger train service to Toronto should just forget it. Stop pushing for a schedule change here or a delay in cuts there or advanced warning about future changes.

It has been a slow death but it's over. Passenger train service in southwestern Ontario is dead.

We can look wistfully at Europe or Japan and remark on how great train service is in other parts of the world and how riding the train is not only economical but convenient and good for the environment.

It doesn't matter. Rail service needs support from upper levels of government and that's something that has ostensibly come to an end.

Our own MP, Gary Schellenberger, was OK with there being just one train from his riding to and from Toronto by remarking that "we still have two."

Then again, it was his boss, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who ordered Via Rail to cut its budget which in turn led to axing a morning train in Stratford.

Schellenberger countered by saying that that people could always drive to Kitchener and take the GO Train which is only 20 minutes to half an hour away. For the record, the Kitchener train station is near the corner of Victoria and Weber Sts. right smack in the downtown core, and Justin Bieber's dad couldn't get there in 20 or 30 minutes, even in his suped-up Bat-illac.

Also, many of the people who take the train do so because they don't have a car. If they had a car to drive to Kitchener, they might drive to Toronto. So the fact that cutting train service here is OK because GO train service is close is flawed logic.

The bottom line is that for rail service to be viable there needs to be more not fewer trains and there's no way that's going to happen as Ottawa and Via are going the other way.

With such minimal services, it's only a matter of time before the last train through Stratford is cut as well.

It's ironic that governments are more than happy to subsidize highways — and around here are musing about spending about a billion dollars to expand Highway 7/8 — yet providing tax dollars for passenger rail service is akin to socialism and cutting funding to Via is seen as good government.

It's also the death knell for anything that resembles even minimal passenger rail service in southwestern Ontario.